Tag Archives: saving digital photos to your computer

How To Keep Your Holiday Photos Safe

Do you remember that commercial with all of the pictures standing inside some guy’s camera, all squished together like they were riding on a subway car at rush hour? They’d all jockey for position hoping that they wouldn’t be the picture that would get deleted to make room for whatever the camera owner wanted to take a picture of next. It was hysterical! Unless you’re the picture that gets deleted. Or the owner of the camera who has to decide which of his favorite pictures to deleted so he can take another.

So how many photos are YOU going to take this Christmas or Hanukkah?

The picture of your toddler opening up her first tricycle?

The shot of your husband nearly knocking over the TV trying to put the star on the tree?

And how many of them will still be around for you to enjoy next year?

Not so funny, is it?

There are two things that put every picture you take, in jeopardy. The first is not taking the time to download the pictures you’ve already taken, onto your computer for safekeeping. The second, is not being prepared to capture that once-in-a-lifetime photo whenever it happens.

Here are two simple steps, you can take that will completely eliminate the danger of losing this year’s special memories.

1) Do not, do not, do not use anything but a regular digital or video camera to take photos during the holidays. Don’t grab the cell phone to snap the picture of the entire family including 101 year old Grandpa Charlie around the Christmas table. Very few cell phones have enough megapixels to grab a good enough picture for the family to keep and share. It might be convenient, but you know as well as I do that you’re going to get a blurry or fuzzy shot instead of what you really want. And even you do manage to snap a Mona Lisa, you’re going to forget to email it to yourself, so don’t even think about it!

2) Instead, choose your best digital camera and keep it at your side throughout the holidays. Keep it charged, or even better keep an extra battery charged as well. And while you’re at it, keep an extra SD card ready to swap out, just in case your Hanukkah dinner ends up being photo-intensive than you thought. To add an additional level of safety, draft another relative to do exactly the same thing so that you’ll get full coverage of every event. Then you can get together when the holidays are over, compare your work and send the best photos to all of your relatives on a CD. Now that’s a holiday to remember.

3) Don’t let the memory card on your camera get so full that you have to start deleting pictures! In fact don’t let it get anywhere near full. At the end of every evening make yourself take five minutes to download that day’s photos to your computer. Make sure you already have the USB cable next to your computer before you leave for the evening so you won’t have any excuses when you get back home. Get your kids or your husband to promise not to let you go to bed without downloading them, even if you have to leave the camera on the bed as a reminder.

4) If you’re really bad at remembering to download your photos to your computer, then watch the video above. The secret is to let the your camera or phone do the downloading for you. How? Buy awireless camera like the Canon Power Shot. Wi-Fi digital cameras automatically connect to the Wi-Fi connection in your home to upload your photos from your camera to your computer, without you having to lift a finger. If you don’t have a wireless camera or don’t want to purchase a new one, get anEye-Ficard. Eye-Fi is an SD card with a built-in wireless connection that will do exactly the same thing. We’ll get into more details about it in another blog post, but you can be in Italy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café with a Wi-Fi connection and your photos will begin appearing on your computer back home, safe and sound until you get return.

This year, don’t leave your photos to chance. Take a moment to take these two simple steps and before you know it, you’ll be enjoying this year’s holiday photos. While you’re putting up the ornaments next year.

More Amazing Things You Can Do In 5 Minutes Or Less

Learn how to put an ICE Contact on every type of smartphone in just minutes with The ICE My Phone Kit! Paperback Edition $14.99Buy now at Amazon.comDownloadable PDF Edition $5.00Buy NowRead more about it
_________________________________________________

The Book Inspired By The Blog. The Backup Plan 3.0

The Backup Plan 3.0, is filled with quick, easy, 5 minute steps you can take right now, to get everything that’s important to you organized, safe, sound and accessible. Each section covers a different area, from backing up and fixing family photos, home movies and music, to vital documents, medical and financial information and even getting your digital life in order. This special Bonus Edition includes 7 downloadable Bonus Books. Paperback Edition $24.99 Buy now at Amazon.comDownloadable PDF Edition $8.00 Buy NowRead more about it

I don’t know about you, but the most important keepsakes in our house are our old family photos, followed closely by our home movies and music. The problem is, grabbing piles of photo albums and all of the picture frames off the walls is hard to do if you have to get out of the house quickly. WithHow To Back Up Your Photos, Videos and Music, you’ll learn quick, easy steps to back up your print/digital photos, home movies, cassettes, vinyl albums and archive them in multiple, disaster proof locations. $12.95 Buy now at Amazon.comRead more about it

Your Business Continuity Plan May Be Missing Something… Like your employees, for instance? If your city is struck by a tornado, earthquake or other disaster, it isn’t just your company that will be affected – so will your employees. That’s why you need to make sure they’re as prepared for an emergency as YOU are. Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered. Read More About It

How To Back Up Your Parent’s Printed Photos

I don’t know about you, but the worst part about watching coverage of earthquakes — like the quakes in Ecuador and Japan — is the look on victim’s faces as they pick through the rubble of their homes, trying to find a photo of their wedding or of their children.

In today’s world, now that we have cell phones, taking photos has become almost a daily event. If one gets harmed or destroyed, we just print out another copy. Not true though for old family photos that are hanging on the wall, or worse, stuck like glue inside a yellowed photo album.

And where will you find most of those old photos? At your parent’s and grandparent’s house — where unfortunately one-of-a-kind can mean just that. One copy and that’s it! What a horrible thing it would be for them or for you to be left without the pictures you treasure the most, especially when keeping them safe and sound is so easy.

So give this post a quick read, grab the tools you need for the job and let’s get Mom and Dad’s photos squared away once and for all!

As you know, there are two types of photos. The first are photo prints – basically anything that is a physical photo, whether it’s in a frame, in an album or lurking in the back of a kitchen or desk drawer. In order to archive those photos, you’ll need to scan them and get them into a digital format so that they can be put on a computer or portable hard drive. That’s what we’ll be dealing with in this chapter. The second type of photo is a digital photo – which we help you back up and archive in another post.

One thing that makes print photos harder to archive than other keepsakes is the simple fact that we get so used to seeing our favorite photos hanging around the house, that we don’t always think to take them off the wall and scan them for safekeeping.

So your first task is to locate all of your parent’s physical photos. Don’t forget to look for all the albums, photos in drawers or files and those hanging in frames on the walls or sitting on the bookshelf. Then you’ll decide which of those photos you want to archive for safekeeping. After that, we’ll get them scanned.

If there are a lot of photos around the house, you’ll probably need some help dealing with all of your pictures. Why not declare one day “scanning day”. Invite a bunch of good friends over to help, and if you have as much fun as we think you will, next time have them bring over their own photos to scan. Do you have kids? That’s even better – they’ll have a great time helping.

1. Grab a pencil and paper, and go around the house jotting down all the non-digital photos or photo collections you want to secure and their current location.

2. Gather all of the photos that you located. Although all of your photos are important, some mean more to your parents than others.

Take a few moments to look at the photo albums, prints and framed photos and separate them into two different piles.

In the first pile, place photos that you want to copy and save in a digital format, for safekeeping.

In the second pile, place photos that you:

Already have in digital format and could easily recopy if the one you’re holding was harmed or destroyed.

Have numerous other copies of the photo in other locations. Check to make sure that this is actually true, before you decide not to scan them.

Simply don’t care enough about to keep it disaster safe.

You can go ahead and put the photos in the second pile back where you found them.

3. Scan Away!

Take the photos in the first pile, scan each one and download it to your computer, placing them in a brand new folder. When you’re finished, make one copy of that complete folder. Place the original folder in with the other digital photos on your computer. Then place the copy of the folder into the backup folder you created earlier.

If you already have digital photos on your computer, save these scanned photos to a new folder within your photos folder. For example, ScannedPrintPhotos, so you’ll know at a glance which photos are the ones you scanned.

4. Make Sure You Back Up ALL Your Photos To At Least Three Locations

Once you have finished scanning, copy that folder containing all of your photos — the digital ones and the ones you just scanned and save it with a different name, like Photo Archive Backup, with today’s date. Place a copy of your backup folder in at least three different locations. Here are a few suggestions of safe places to store them:

•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, and take them with you during evacuation on a key ring or in your plastic evacuation bin.

•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box or water/fireproof safe in your own city.

•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box, water/fireproof safe, or with relatives in the city where you’ll be evacuating.

•In a password-protected online file repository or on the file directory of your family’s personal web site. This way, you can retrieve them from any Internet-enabled computer.

•You can also save an extra copy of your photos on Flickr or another internet photo service. But this really shouldn’t be your long-term solution or only solution, since you have no control over these sites and could lose all of your data without any warning.

•If you really want to keep photos on a secure site that you can share with your family, try iMemories.com. Not only do they have great servers with outstanding redundant backup capability, but they can even put your photos on DVD for you, providing an extra layer of safety.

If you need more help scanning your photos — or if you have delicate or color challenged photos that need a bit more attention, here are a few tips.

How To Scan Your Photos

There are several great ways to scan your photos. Just to clarify, a scanner is different than a copy machine, because a scanner makes an exact digital copy of a photo. It’s a world of difference from a photo copy, which is usually pretty bad. In many cases a scan of a photo is better than the original. And the nice thing about them is that once you scan a photo, you can save it onto your computer, share it with family and friends or use photo software to correct faded color, repair damage or otherwise restore old photographs.

Most printers available now are three or four in one printers, that scan as well as print. You can also scan your photos with a dedicated flatbed scanner (all it does is scan).

Or you can scan your photos with a portable wand scanner, as we mentioned earlier. Portable wand scanners, like theVuPoint Wand Scanner, have come a long way. They run on batteries or are rechargeable and save anything you scan onto an SD card. From there, you can download the scans/photos directly to your computer, via a USB cord, or you can pop the SD card out of the scanner and pop it into your computer to archive your scans.

The best part about having a portable wand scanner is that you can scan photos, documents, even things like marriage certificates or historical documents by swiping the scanner over it, instead of having to take all of those documents home and putting them, one at a time, through your scanner. It’s especially good, like we said, for scanning photos at relative’s homes. If they don’t want the photo leaving the house, just take the scanner over and scan the photos you want. Amazingly, if you’re dealing with a fragile photo, you can even scan it right in the frame. Or if you have delicate photos in a photo album – have you ever tried to peel photos out of an album without damaging them – you can simply open the book and sweep the scanner over the page. Then all you have to do is open the scanned page and crop the photos apart, saving each one as a separate photo. Photos archived, originals safeguarded!

One other scanner we wanted to mention is one that stands out among all the others in the marketplace, for color correction. It’s the Epson Perfection line of scanners, with Epson’s Easy Photo Fix software. There are several models on Amazon.com. Do you have any of those photos from the seventies and eighties that ended up a muddled brown-orange mess? All you have to do is use the Auto Fix setting on the scanner and then scan your seventies photos. The scanner corrects the color while it scans. Truly amazing!

If you don’t have access to a scanner, then have a relative or friend scan them for you. Scanning is by far the cheapest and most effective way of safeguarding your important photos. If you can’t get them scanned, go to a copy shop like Fed Ex-Kinko’s and have copies made of all your photos, using non-acid paper. This will ensure that they will last longer and will fade less as they age.

Now that you know what you’re doing, scan all the loose prints that you want to preserve. The higher the dpi the better the quality, so use 300 or 600 on your oldest, most treasured photos. Then save the scans to your computer to back them up.

Fixing Faded or Damaged Old Photos

Once you have all of your photos or documents scanned and saved, look through and find any that are damaged, faded or yellowed and see if you can edit them to get them into better shape.

A lot of people run right for their favorite photo software programs — like Adobe Photoshop Elements. Adobe is definitely one of the best and we’ve used it on our own photos with great results. But the problem is, there are so many tools within it to fix your photos, that it can be a little difficult, not to mention daunting, to use. One day, Mom and I had had it, trying to get the results we wanted on some of our pictures that needed a lot of color correction. So we began to look for a way to get the correction we wanted in the same few steps (and I mean FEW), whether the pictures were simply faded or way out of whack.

I’m happy to say we found it. Or rather created it! We found five steps that work to color correct nearly any photo of any age, using Photoshop Elements and put them into our book Photo Finish. It’s downloadable for a limited time. Below is one of the photos that we edited using those five steps. That’s me at Disneyland when I was about four. If you have a lot of pictures from the fifties to the eighties that have turned strange shades, download a free copy of our book.

No matter what method you use to scan and back up your parent’s or grandparent’s old photos, the beaming grins on their faces will tell you exactly how much this — and you — mean to them!

More Amazing Things You Can Do In 5 Minutes Or Less

Learn how to put an ICE Contact on every type of smartphone in just minutes with The ICE My Phone Kit! Paperback Edition $14.99Buy now at Amazon.comDownloadable PDF Edition $5.00Buy NowRead more about it
_________________________________________________

The Book Inspired By The Blog. The Backup Plan 3.0

The Backup Plan 3.0, is filled with quick, easy, 5 minute steps you can take right now, to get everything that’s important to you organized, safe, sound and accessible. Each section covers a different area, from backing up and fixing family photos, home movies and music, to vital documents, medical and financial information and even getting your digital life in order. This special Bonus Edition includes 7 downloadable Bonus Books. Paperback Edition $24.99 Buy now at Amazon.comDownloadable PDF Edition $8.00 Buy NowRead more about it

I don’t know about you, but the most important keepsakes in our house are our old family photos, followed closely by our home movies and music. The problem is, grabbing piles of photo albums and all of the picture frames off the walls is hard to do if you have to get out of the house quickly. WithHow To Back Up Your Photos, Videos and Music, you’ll learn quick, easy steps to back up your print/digital photos, home movies, cassettes, vinyl albums and archive them in multiple, disaster proof locations. $12.95 Buy now at Amazon.comRead more about it

Your Business Continuity Plan May Be Missing Something… Like your employees, for instance? If your city is struck by a tornado, earthquake or other disaster, it isn’t just your company that will be affected – so will your employees. That’s why you need to make sure they’re as prepared for an emergency as YOU are. Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered. Read More About It

I don’t know about you, but the worst part about watching coverage of recent tornadoes and earthquakes is the look on victim’s faces as they pick through the rubble of their homes, trying to find a keepsake. Even a photo of their wedding or of their children, can mean the difference between being with or without their cherished memories. What a horrible thing it would be to be left without the pictures you treasure the most, especially when keeping them safe and sound no matter what the disaster is so easy. Here is a clip of an interview Ann Curry did on MSNBC November 1st with a woman who lost everything in Hurricane Sandy.

Have you been through the family photo album lately? What shape are your pictures in? Are they sparkling and colorful or faded and lifeless. Have you taken the time to scan them so they’re backed up and secure or is the print you’re holding, the only one of its kind?

One thing that makes photos harder to archive than other keepsakes is the simple fact that we get so used to seeing our favorite photos hanging around the house, that we don’t always think to take them off the wall and scan them for safekeeping.

And it’s not just us. Relatives are notorious for being the keepers of their part of the family history, to the point where many times they won’t even take a favorite photo out of the frame, let alone, allow you to take it home with you to scan. The good news is that with the advent of portable wand scanners, you can see that photo any time you want. The bad news is, you may have to be at Aunt Sadie’s house to use it! But, not to worry. We have some fabulous tips and tools that will give you access to all of your favorite pictures and get them easily and painlessly archived for all the members of your family, including dear Aunt Sadie.

As you know, there are two types of photos, digital and print. In this post we’ll be dealing with prints – basically anything that is a physical photo, whether it’s in a frame, in an album or lurking in the back of a kitchen or desk drawer. In order to archive those photos, you’ll need to scan them and get them into a digital format so that they can be put on a computer or portable hard drive.

In a few moments we’ll ask you to locate all of your physical photos. Don’t forget to look for all your albums, photos in drawers or files and those hanging in frames on the walls or sitting on your bookshelf. Then you’ll decide which of those photos you want to archive for safekeeping. After that, we’ll get them scanned.

LifeHack
If you’re as tired of grocery shopping as we are, here’s a great hack. Gobble does it for you. Just choose the meal (or meals) you want and the ingredients and easy to use recipe show up at your door ready to be turned into a quick nutritious meal. I am SO there! Check it out here!

If you have a lot of photos around the house, you’ll probably need some help dealing with all of your pictures. Why not declare one day “scanning day”. Invite a bunch of good friends over to help, and if you have as much fun as we think you will, next time have them bring over their own photos to scan. Do you have kids? That’s even better – they’ll have a great time helping.

Take Action!

1. Photos, Oh Photos… Where Are You?

First, locate and gather all of your physical photos.

Don’t forget to look for all your albums, photos in drawers or files and those hanging in frames on the walls or sitting on your bookshelf. Then you’ll decide which of those photos you want to archive for safekeeping.

2. Which Ones Do I Scan?

Although all of your photos are important, some mean more to you than others. Separate your photos into two different piles.

In Pile 1, place photos that you want to copy and save in a digital format, for safekeeping.

In Pile 2, place photos that you:

•Already have in digital format and could easily recopy if the one you’re holding was harmed or destroyed.

•Have numerous copies of in other locations. Check to make sure that this is actually true, before you decide not to scan them.

•Simply don’t care enough about to keep it disaster safe.

You can go ahead and put the photos in the second pile back where you found them.

3. Scan Away!

Scan all of the photos in Pile 1 saving them to your computer, as you scan. If you have a lot of photos, get the kids involved or throw a scanning party for your relatives, and let them help you scan, then give them a copy of the photos they want to take home with them.

If you already have digital photos on your computer, save these scanned photos to a new folder within your photos folder. For example, ScannedPrintPhotos, so you’ll know at a glance which photos are the ones you scanned.

4. Make Sure You Back Up ALL Your Photos To At Least Three Locations

Once you have finished scanning, copy that folder containing all of your photos — the digital ones and the ones you just scanned and save it with a different name, like Photo Archive Backup, with today’s date. Place a copy of your backup folder in at least three different locations. Here are a few suggestions of safe places to store them:

•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, and take them with you during evacuation on a key ring or in your plastic evacuation bin.

•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box or water/fireproof safe in your own city.

•On a flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box, water/fireproof safe, or with relatives in the city where you’ll be evacuating.

•In a password-protected online file repository or on the file directory of your family’s personal web site. This way, you can retrieve them from any Internet-enabled computer.

•You can also save an extra copy of your photos on Flickr or another internet photo service. But this really shouldn’t be your long-term solution or only solution, since you have no control over these sites and could lose all of your data without any warning.

•If you really want to keep photos on a secure site that you can share with your family, try iMemories.com. Not only do they have great servers with outstanding redundant backup capability, but they can even put your photos on DVD for you, providing an extra layer of safety.

If you need more help scanning your photos — or if you have delicate or color challenged photos that need a bit more attention, here are a few tips.

How To Scan Your Photos

There are several great ways to scan your photos. Just to clarify, a scanner is different than a copy machine, because a scanner makes an exact digital copy of a photo. It’s a world of difference from a photo copy, which is usually pretty bad. In many cases a scan of a photo is better than the original. And the nice thing about them is that once you scan a photo, you can save it onto your computer, share it with family and friends or use photo software to correct faded color, repair damage or otherwise restore old photographs.

Most printers available now are three or four in one printers, that scan as well as print. You can also scan your photos with a dedicated flatbed scanner (all it does is scan).

Or you can scan your photos with a portable wand scanner, as we mentioned earlier. Portable wand scanners, like theVuPoint Wand Scanner, have come a long way. They run on batteries or are rechargeable and save anything you scan onto an SD card. From there, you can download the scans/photos directly to your computer, via a USB cord, or you can pop the SD card out of the scanner and pop it into your computer to archive your scans.

The best part about having a portable wand scanner is that you can scan photos, documents, even things like marriage certificates or historical documents by swiping the scanner over it, instead of having to take all of those documents home and putting them, one at a time, through your scanner. It’s especially good, like we said, for scanning photos at relative’s homes. If they don’t want the photo leaving the house, just take the scanner over and scan the photos you want. Amazingly, if you’re dealing with a fragile photo, you can even scan it right in the frame. Or if you have delicate photos in a photo album – have you ever tried to peel photos out of an album without damaging them – you can simply open the book and sweep the scanner over the page. Then all you have to do is open the scanned page and crop the photos apart, saving each one as a separate photo. Photos archived, originals safeguarded!

One other method of scanning that we wanted to mention is theKodak Personal Scanner. It’s a bit different than the others, because you can feed photos into it and it scans them as they pass through an inch thick scanning bed. The interesting part is that it comes with an attachment that feeds negatives and slides into the scanner and – are you ready for this – actually makes a digital copy of the photo, just as if you had taken it to the photo processor. We actually had some slides that someone had given us, and since we never used slides, we didn’t have the equipment to look at them. With the Kodak Scanner, all we did was feed the slide into the scanner and suddenly we had full color, beautiful photos from the sixties, that looked like they were processed yesterday. Absolutely amazing!

If you don’t have access to a scanner, then have a relative or friend scan them for you. Scanning is by far the cheapest and most effective way of safeguarding your important photos. If you can’t get them scanned, go to a copy shop like Fed Ex-Kinko’s and have copies made of all your photos, using non-acid paper. This will ensure that they will last longer and will fade less as they age.

Now that you know what you’re doing, scan all the loose prints that you want to preserve. The higher the dpi the better the quality, so use 300 or 600 on your oldest, most treasured photos. Then save the scans to your computer to back them up.

Once you have all of your photos or documents scanned and saved, look through and find any that are damaged, faded or yellowed and see if you can edit them to get them into better shape.

A lot of people run right for their favorite photo software programs — like Adobe Photoshop Elements. Adobe is definitely one of the best and we’ve used it on our own photos with great results. But the problem is, there are so many tools within it to fix your photos, that it can be a little difficult, not to mention daunting, to use. One day, Mom and I had had it, trying to get the results we wanted on some of our pictures that needed a lot of color correction. So we began to look for a way to get the correction we wanted in the same few steps (and I mean FEW), whether the pictures were simply faded or way out of whack.

I’m happy to say we found it. Or rather created it! We found five steps that work to color correct nearly any photo of any age, using Photoshop Elements and put them into our book Photo Finish. It’s downloadable for a limited time. Below is one of the photos that we edited using those five steps. That’s me at Disneyland when I was about four. If you have a lot of pictures from the fifties to the eighties that have turned strange shades, download a free copy of our book.

If you don’t have the time, energy or inclination to fix your photos yourself, we’ve found one scanner that stands out among all the others in the marketplace, for color correction. It’s the Epson Perfection line of scanners, with Epson’s Easy Photo Fix software. Do you have any of those photos from the seventies and eighties that ended up a muddled brown-orange mess? All you have to do is use the Auto Fix setting on the scanner and then scan your seventies photos. The scanner corrects the color while it scans. Truly amazing!

More Amazing Things You Can Do In 5 Minutes Or Less

Learn how to put an ICE Contact on every type of smartphone in just minutes with The ICE My Phone Kit! Paperback Edition $14.99Buy now at Amazon.comDownloadable PDF Edition $5.00Buy NowRead more about it
_________________________________________________

The Book Inspired By The Blog. The Backup Plan 3.0

The Backup Plan 3.0, is filled with quick, easy, 5 minute steps you can take right now, to get everything that’s important to you organized, safe, sound and accessible. Each section covers a different area, from backing up and fixing family photos, home movies and music, to vital documents, medical and financial information and even getting your digital life in order. This special Bonus Edition includes 7 downloadable Bonus Books. Paperback Edition $24.99 Buy now at Amazon.comDownloadable PDF Edition $8.00 Buy NowRead more about it

I don’t know about you, but the most important keepsakes in our house are our old family photos, followed closely by our home movies and music. The problem is, grabbing piles of photo albums and all of the picture frames off the walls is hard to do if you have to get out of the house quickly. WithHow To Back Up Your Photos, Videos and Music, you’ll learn quick, easy steps to back up your print/digital photos, home movies, cassettes, vinyl albums and archive them in multiple, disaster proof locations. $12.95 Buy now at Amazon.comRead more about it

Your Business Continuity Plan May Be Missing Something… Like your employees, for instance? If your city is struck by a tornado, earthquake or other disaster, it isn’t just your company that will be affected – so will your employees. That’s why you need to make sure they’re as prepared for an emergency as YOU are. Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered. Read More About It

How To Archive Your Digital Photos

With digital photography as inexpensive and easy as it is today, chances are that you have more photos of your family, friends and the special moments of your life than ever before. If you’re like most people, all of those photos are sitting on your computer, in a bunch of different folders.

Or worse, hundreds of them are sitting in your camera, just waiting to be accidentally erased. And what about your regular print photos – the kind you have in photo albums or frames? At least the digital photos have a chance of being copied and backed up in a few different locations. But if those one-of-a-kind family photos are destroyed, they’re gone forever. Digital or print, all it takes is one fire, flood, fried hard drive, or hacked Facebook account and all of those memories are gone, along with a huge piece of your family’s history. Before we start backing up your current photos, here are a few tips on ways to safeguard all the photos you’ll be taking in the future.

Do you regularly pictures with your phone? If you do, how often do you download them to your computer for printing or safekeeping? Everyone should get into the habit of downloading their new pictures and videos every few days. Dropbox is a great tool for this. It’s a free application/web based file box that syncs up the photos and documents on your smartphone or tablet with your computer. All you have to do is set up and download their app on your iPhone, Android smartphone, tablet, iPad or iPod Touch. Then save your new photos to your Dropbox folder and they’ll be waiting for you at home on your computer.

Another great option is to take your favorite photos and make them into a special keepsake, like a smartphone case. Casetify is so wonderful at this. All you have to do is upload your photo using the Casetify app and they’ll turn your picture into a beautiful but tough smartphone case for your iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone.

Now that you’ve got your smartphone photos under control, how about your digital camera? Exactly how many photos are on your SD card right now? Yeah, that’s what we thought. So before you get started, be sure to download all of the pictures from your cameras. And while you’re at it, download any videos lurking on your video camera too. We’ll take care of those in anotherblog post.

Take Action!

Your Mission: If You Choose to Accept It…

…is to make all of your treasured photos completely accessible during a disaster, emergency evacuation, computer or Internet meltdown. Just follow the steps below to locate all of your important photos, scan or copy them, and store them in at least three secure, damage-proof locations.

1. Grab Your Cameras

If you’re like most people, your digital photos are in one of two places – sitting on your computer, in a bunch of different folders. Or worse, sitting in your camera or phone, just waiting to be accidentally erased.

So if you have any photos on your cameras or phones, go get them now and download them to your computer, saving them to the folder where you normally store them.

LifeHack
We’ve found an amazing way to keep all your favorite photos at your fingertips – literally! Just turn them into a spectacular phone case. All you have to do is upload them to your Casetify app, choose your favorite type of case for your phone and presto, you have your very own custom high-quality phone case. Check it out here!

2. Ready For Backup

Since you’re already on your computer, let’s back up all of your digital photos.

Create one new folder on your computer desktop and name it Backup Photos (dd/mm/yy) with today’s date.

Locate all of the digital photos that you want to keep safe. Leave the original files where they are on your computer, but copy each one and place the copies in your new Backup folder.

If you need instructions on copying and moving files and folders on your computer, you’ll find them on our postHow To Back Up Your Dataor if you’d rather, just download theHow-To Sheet.

When you’re through copying and pasting your folders into the Backup Folder, make sure that there is a copy of your folders in the original location as well as the new location.

3. How To Get Your Digital Photos To Download Themselves

By the way, if you regularly have trouble remembering to download your pictures from your phone and camera watch the video at the beginning of this post, to learn how to get your camera and phone to download photos themselves. Here are two things you can do that will really help. For your phone, go right now and install the Dropbox app. It’s a free app that will send every photo you take with your phone directly to your computer.

As for your camera, simply get a Wi-Fi enabled camera like theSamsung Smart Wi-Fi Cameraor the Eye-Fi smart memory card for your old camera. Snap a photo and it arrives on your computer. No muss, no fuss.

4. Safely Storing Digital Photos

Where and how you decide to secure and store your photos is up to you. But here are a few ideas. If your photos are digital, you can place them:

On a flash drive or portable hard drive, and take them with you during evacuation on a key ring or in your plastic evacuation bin.

Place the flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box or water/fireproof safe in your own city.

Place the flash drive or portable hard drive, in a safe deposit box, water/fireproof safe, or with relatives in the city where you’ll be evacuating.

Place the photos on a password-protected online file repository or on the file directory of your family’s personal web site. This way, you can retrieve them from any Internet-enabled computer.

You can also save an extra copy of your photos on Flickr or another internet photo service. But this really shouldn’t be your long-term solution, or only solution. As much as we all love Internet sharing sites, you actually have no control over them. If the company were to go out of business, or if their servers were to crash, you could lose all of your lose data without any warning. If you really want to keep photos on a secure site that you can share with your family, tryiMemories.com. Not only do they have great servers with outstanding redundant backup capability, but they can even put your photos on DVD for you, providing an extra layer of safety.

5. Safely Storing Photo Prints

Now that your digital photos are safe and sound, what about your print photos? Do they need to be archived too? Then take a minute or two while you’re thinking about it and read ourpostor download our PDF onHow to Archive Your Print Photos.

If your print photos are already in order here are a few ideas to safeguard them. Try placing them in:

In a safe deposit box or water/fireproof safe in your own city.

In a safe deposit box, water/fireproof safe, or with relatives in the city where you’ll be evacuating.

In your watertight Plastic Evacuation Bin. Only place the photos that you actually need to have with you, in this bin. If you’ll also have access to copies of photos in your safe deposit box, then don’t take any copies with you that you would worry about, if lost.

If you live in a location with frequent disasters, like hurricane or tornado country, you should probably consider a permanent solution to safeguard your photo prints, like putting your photos in acid free boxes inside a watertight Rubbermaid Roughneck bin, or glass containers, and then placing them at least a foot or two off the ground, whenever your cherished photos might be in danger. For example an impending hurricane, flooding or even the arrival of tiny, curious grandchildren. If you are in a location where flooding can occur, store your photos in the driest place, at least a foot or two above any previous water marks.

Depending on the situation it might even be a good idea to move those bins to a storage space or to a friend’s or relative’s home for safekeeping until the situation passes.

Want to download these instructions for later?Click Hereto download the PDF version.

Join us here next week on the blog or on our Facebook page when we’ll help you Do One MORE Thing to get your life up and running.

Have Fun Getting Your Stuff Together! We’ll talk later…

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